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User Experience Challenge Announced
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Microsoft is encouraging student developers and designers to give consideration to ux design with their 2015 User Experience challenge. The competition requires students to create many of the components used in a traditional user experience design process. This includes creating storyboards that walk a user through a typical experience with an application or website, a user flow diagram that shows how users experience the key functionality, along with information architecture diagrams that show how the pages, screens, and menus tie together. Participants are also expected to create low fidelity wireframes which show sample screens from a project. These are sketch-like iterations which illustrate core concepts of a design, without providing precision detail needed for final implementation. A final high-fidelity mock-up is the final deliverable for the ux design competition. The mock-up provides a visual design that is ready to implement, and represents the final design of the app or website being created.
By adding a UX design challenge to their annual Imagine Cup, Microsoft is acknowledging the importance that user experience design plays in creating a successful application or website. It is important that students who are learning to code at an earlier age also learn to recognize the role that UX design plays in an application. The best coded app or website won’t succeed if users find it difficult to navigate or don’t understand the navigational structure. By planning out the user experience before coding, developers spend less time making revisions, and are more likely to achieve their desired results. This is not the first effort Microsoft has made at directing attention towards the importance of ux design. While it has not yet been widely adopted, Microsoft’s Windows Phone has received praise by many user experience professionals.
The Imagine Cub competition is open to students ages 16 and older, and includes a $3,000 prize for the first-place winner. Learn more about the UX competition here. If you’re no longer a full-time student but want to learn more about UX, consider the UX classes or user experience certificate at American Graphics Institute.
About the author
Jennifer Smith is a user experience designer, educator and author based in Boston. She has worked in the field of user experience design for more than 15 years.She has designed websites, ecommerce sites, apps, and embedded systems. Jennifer designs solutions for mobile, desktop, and iOT devices.
Jennifer delivers UX training and UX consulting for large Fortune 100 companies, small start-ups, and independent software vendors.She has served as a Designer in Residence at Microsoft, assisting third-party app developers to improve their design solutions and create successful user experiences. She has been hired by Adobe and Microsoft to deliver training workshops to their staff, and has traveled to Asia, Europe, India, the Middle East, and across the U.S. to deliver courses and assist on UX design projects. She has extensive knowledge of modern UX Design, and worked closely with major tech companies to create educational material and deliver UX workshops to key partners globally. Jennifer works with a wide range of prototyping tools including XD, Sketch, Balsamiq, Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Blend for Visual Studio. She also works extensively in the fields of presentation design and visual design.
Jennifer is also an expert on Photoshop, digital image editing, and photo manipulation. Having written 10 books on Photoshop, and having consulted and provided training to major media companies and businesses around the globe.
Jennifer is the author of more than 20 books on design tools and processes, including Adobe Creative Cloud for Dummies, Adobe Creative Cloud Digital Classroom, and Photoshop Digital Classroom. She has been awarded a Microsoft MVP three times for her work with user experience design in creating apps for touch, desktop, and mobile devices. Jennifer holds the CPUX-F certification from the User Experience Qualification Board and assists others in attaining this designation in leading a UX certification course at American Graphics Institute. She is a candidate for a Master’s degree in Human Factors in Information Design.